Police found a sea container equipped as a torture chamber, in Wouwse Plantage, Netherlands during a raid in 2020. Photo / AP
The escalating savagery of the cocaine wars in the Low Countries has led to gangsters setting up a Hollywood-style facility.
Imagine the terror. You have been snatched off the street or from your home by armed men pretending to be police.
You have been blindfolded, bundled into the back of a stolen van, driven God knows where and then manacled in excruciating positions for hours, possibly days.
You are cold, confused, petrified. But the real horror is only beginning. The sound of a heavy metal door whining: your captors are coming. They march you out, another door opens, and they lift the black bag from your head.
Before you is a rectangular chamber coated in an otherworldly silver lining. Saws, hammers, loppers, scalpels and pliers litter the floor. And at its centre awaits an old-fashioned dentist chair - with straps for the arms and ankles.
Welcome to the "treatment room".
This isn't Hollywood, although it might have been influenced by it.
It was in fact a real-life torture facility, painstakingly constructed by narco gangsters in an anonymous warehouse in the middle of the quiet Dutch countryside.
When police – real this time – raided it in June 2020, even they were aghast. Hardened, they thought, to the escalating savagery of the cocaine wars in the Low Countries, this seemed a new nadir. Prosecutors allege it was intended to be nothing short of a round-the-clock factory of pain.
Seven converted shipping containers – six "prison cells" and one torture chamber. Plus another warehouse on the outskirts of Rotterdam to serve as an alleged kidnap base, stuffed with firearms, fake police uniforms, high-speed cars and prisoner transport vans.
Victims were to be shipped in by the busload, police believe. And no one was to be spared; not women, children, not even family dogs.
Perhaps most terrifyingly of all, nobody – literally nobody – would have heard the screams. The chamber was insulated with soundproofing, enabling the torturers to continue their gruesome work hour after hour without interruption.
The men currently on trial for plotting to imprison and torture deny the charges. One said he thought he was building a cannabis loft; another says they only built it to scare their rivals, but never planned to use it in anger.
Standing against them is a tranche of intercepted messages allegedly between the gang members which Dutch police say prove just how serious the plans were.
"If I've got him on the chair, more will come," says one. "I wasn't a fan of kids. S---, by Allah, kids are allowed too," reads another.
"It's triple isolated," a further message states. "Even if you're standing next to it, you'll hear nothing."
The facility was busted just a week before it was due to become operational, prosecutors say, although they believe blood stains found on the chair are evidence of one preliminary victim.
The violence allegedly intended to be meted out would have been barbaric. But it was far from mindless.
In fact, the messages suggest the containers, nicknamed EBI, after a Dutch high-security prison, were to be the centrepiece of a kind of sick parallel justice system.
If you think this all sounds more like Pablo Escobar-era Colombia than a country popularly associated with tulips, bicycles and windmills, then experts on the modern drug trade might well retort that you haven't been paying attention.
Both the Netherlands and Belgium have been rocked in recent years by a crescendo of barbarism, fuelled by the astronomical sums to be made controlling the import of cocaine and other substances through the sprawling ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp.
It has seen severed heads left on streets, the assassination of journalists and lawyers, triggering a spate of major trafficking and murder trials being conducted under quasi-military security.
Jan Struijs, the chairman of the biggest Dutch police union, even described his country as "having the characteristics of a narco state".
"Sure we're not Mexico – we don't have 14,400 murders," he said. "But if you look at the infrastructure, the big money earned by organised crime, the parallel economy, yes, we have a narco-state."
Nevertheless, even the most cynical observers agree that the shipping containers, discovered in Wouwse Plantage near the Belgian border, break new ground.
Put simply, nothing quite like this has ever been seen before. And not only in Europe.
Away from the courtroom, Jan Meeus, crime reporter at NRC Handeslblad in Amsterdam and presenter of a podcast on Holland's cocaine wars, said: "Torture, kidnapping, criminals beating each other up is as old as organised crime, but preparing a torture facility on this scale is special.
"It's clear from the files and the investigation that they had been preparing this for at least a couple of months and had made preparations to kidnap people.
"It was very well prepared and they spent lots of money on it. That's what distinguishes this."
"The chair", as it has come to be known, has both revolted and intrigued Dutch society.
But how did it come about? What could possibly have triggered someone to resort to such cruelty? And who was the mysterious first and only victim of the chair?
Roger P has come a long way since being jailed for robbery and assault in 2006. Now 50, until his arrest in 2020 he led an enviable international lifestyle: fast cars, luxury apartments, expensive wines - you get the picture.
When police raided his house they even found €15,000 ($24,000) in "change" stuffed in a Champagne cooler. He managed to achieve this success by staying mostly under the radar.
According to police files, while in prison the Rotterdam-born Dutchman befriended a fellow inmate of Moroccan heritage with links to organised crime.
After his release in 2009, according to police files, he began to travel regularly to South and Central America, with sometimes up to 12 trips a year to the likes of Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama.
In 2015 he moved officially to Costa Rica, which in time yielded him the underworld nickname of "Piet Costa".
He located himself there, police allege, to take advantage of the country's burgeoning status as a staging post for the supply of cocaine to Europe. This was helped in no small measure, they say, by the expansion of the pineapple export business, which offered narcos rich opportunities for smuggling their wares. He returned to live in Rotterdam in 2018.
"Piet Costa is seen as a significant figure in the Dutch cocaine mafia," says Jans Meeus, who has presented a podcast about him.
"Over the last 10 years he's become one of the main bosses in that field. The paradox is that he's done this mostly out of sight, and often out of the Netherlands."
Business was good. So good, in fact, that P allegedly began investing his profits in the Middle East, which is where his problems began.
"He got involved in a conflict where he accused someone of stealing €100 million to €130 million off him that was invested in Dubai," says Meeus.
"The person didn't want to pay it back. That was in early 2020. Over the next few months the conflict escalated to the extent that they were getting ready to kill people."
The man P accused of stealing his money was part of a group of criminals of Iranian descent.
According to police files, P became aware that, as the row escalated, the group had drawn up an assassination list of eight people. Both his name, and that of a close friend associate, Ibrahim Azaim, 25, were on it.
On May 11, 2020, Azaim died in a hail of more than 20 bullets shot by balaclava-wearing assassins near to his family home in Rotterdam. P was reputedly incandescent at the murder - the younger man has been described as a son-like figure to him.
However, there is some evidence to suggest the Wouwse Plantage facility may already have been used, accounting for the blood stains found by police in the June raid. And the real reason, says Meeus, was the money.
"It appears that the main adversary to Piet Costa was an Iranian man, Ali Reza, Allegedly they kidnapped him and put him in the chair and he gave back up to €50 million.
"They let him go because he promised to pay the rest back."
Messages seized by police suggest that as the days ticked by and the balance was not repaid, the group soon regretted their clemency.
That, allege prosecutors, plus the murder of Ibrahim, is when the usually discreet P decided to push ahead with plans for torture on a systematic scale.
Having proved to themselves that the practice could yield results, the gang allegedly planned to drill, saw, hack, burn and flay their way to recovering the rest of the missing cash.
"Basically they wanted to get the money back," says Meeus. "This is really all about drug money."
So the gangsters set to work. However, although they didn't know at first exactly what they were looking at, the police were already watching.
The EncroChat bust of 2020 has been hailed as one of the biggest blows against organised crime for years.
The international covert police infiltration of the so-called "WhatsApp for gangsters", an encrypted network beloved by top criminals, resulted in scores of high-profile arrests across multiple countries. Britain's National Crime Agency described the breakthrough as "like getting the keys to Aladdin's cave".
Dutch police were no less keen to pick through the treasure trove, and before long they came across messages that led them to the warehouse in the south of the country. They set up a hidden camera so they could spy on the building.
However, rather than a scene from Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino's iconic gangster caper, set in a warehouse, all they could see was a group of mainly middle-aged men appearing to do some DIY.
And you can see why. The alleged torture facility was a labour of love by any standard. The shipping containers were elaborately insulated with nailed-in sound-proof plates, the floors covered with self-adhesive PrimaCover material, intended for "safe protection against liquids".
The dentist chair itself had been purchased off Marktplaats, a Dutch classified advertising website similar to Gumtree.
In addition to the cruder implements of torture – pruning sheers, duct tape etc – there was also equipment to conduct water boarding. As a police spokesman put it at the time: "The image of the shipping containers is chilling and downright shocking."
But while the torture implements are the most grimly compelling element, what was found in the other containers was arguably just as revealing as to the warehouse's dire potential.
Also soundproofed, the six other containers were allegedly designed as holding cells for those waiting to be tortured. One had handcuffs on the ground to hold captives in a crouching position; another had them hanging from the ceiling, forcing the captive to stand with their arms raised.
There was a chemical toilet. Meanwhile, in an adjacent room there was a sitting and sleeping area for the "guards", complete with a sink, coffee machine, table and chairs.
This is all, allege prosecutors, evidence of an an intention to run a sustained and professional torture operation.
There were multiple cameras. If, as prosecutors allege, P's purpose was to terrify his rivals into returning his cash, why merely torture someone when you could also film it and send the footage to the victim's friends as well?
Roger P denies planning to abduct and torture, but has said nothing in his defence. He is additionally facing charges trafficking thousands of kilos of cocaine through Rotterdam and Antwerp in 2015 and 2016, which he also denies.
Prosecuters want 12 years for a conviction of the torture, and are separately demanding 17 and nine months for the trafficking.
A fellow defendant in the torture case, named in court as Robin van O, 41, who is accused of playing a leading role in setting up the facility, has said a little more. According to his lawyer, his client was "nothing more than a simple handyman who thought he was busy furnishing cannabis lofts".
The case against van O is currently postponed due to serious illness.
Either way, the state is hoping that the Encro chat messages will do the talking for them.
One, allegedly sent by P using the codename Luxuryballoon, suggests the normally careful, discreet kingpin was not planning to stay above the fray.
"I'm not normally from this department," it says. "But there are a few I hope I get the chance to torture."
It was in the Encrochat messages that the phrase "treatment room" was used.
It's clear, then – at least according to Dutch prosecutors – why Roger P and his associates wanted to torture their rival gang. Greed and revenge are powerful motivators. But that hardly explains why they should choose to go about it like this.
The elaborate preparation of the converted shipping containers at Wouwse Plantage has surprised narco watchers across the world. After all, what's wrong with a good old-fashioned cellar and a couple of crowbars?
Jeremy McDermott, who runs the investigative InSight Crime agency from the Colombian trafficking hub of Medellin, says: "It seems a lot of theatre.
"In Latin America it tends to be much more primitive. It's done anywhere and with whatever the tools are at hand.
"We've never come across anything as theatrical as this, and I have never come across the need for a torture infrastructure."
The precedent for systematic use of torture among Euorpean drug gangs is limited.
In 2018 two members of a Belgian gang known as the Turtles were kidnapped and filmed being mutilated with a soldering iron. In recent years Balkan gangs have also been known to dabble, with residents of Belgrade complaining of "sawing sounds". But comparable examples are few and far between.
However, if a narco gang in supposedly quiet and civilised western Europe decided to go in for torture in a big way, wouldn't they have to do it like this?
Niko Vorobyov, author of Dopeworld and a former drug dealer, says: "The Netherlands and Belgium are pretty safe countries overall, so you can't get away with widescale butchery and littering the streets with bodies.
"That's one of the reasons why the Morocans are slowly being brought down at the moment. In Colombia you can just take them [victims] out to the sticks and cut their fingers off, whatever - witnesses are too scared to tell. But here it makes sense to have a dedicated place."
So, although Roger P, aka "Piet Costa", has allegedly strong links to Latin America, it seems unlikely that he got the idea for his torture chamber there.
Perhaps popular culture, and in particular Hollywood, is as much to blame as real-life Medellin or Cali. After all, torture sells, and in recent decades scenes depicting it have become some of the most memorable in cinema history.
Think of Pulp Fiction, with the gangland boss Marsellus Wallace bellowing at his whimpering captive of his plans to "get medieval on your ass".
Or Reservoir Dogs, and its unforgettable moment where a whimsically sadistic armed robber, played by Michael Madsen, slices the ear off a captured policeman.
"It's amusing to me to torture a cop," he explains, helpfully, before doing so.
Echoes of Wouwse Plantage?
And what of waterboarding? Would P and his associates have – allegedly – thought to inflict the controversial practice had it received so much airtime and movie representations since 9/11?
Whatever its origins, P's alleged wholesale embrace of torture raises questions about the maturity of his gang's business approach, according to Mr McDermott, the South America expert.
"Torture can be used in specific circumstances, but on the whole it's not good for business," he says.
"Certainly in Colombia the idea of torturing women and children is not commonplace. It's usually the sign of rather an unsophisticated organisation."
He explained that, although of course still wading in bloodshed, the Colombian cocaine trade has developed an adjudication system to cut down on tit for tat violence.
"It means if things do go wrong you don't have to kill each other. You can go to a third party called the Officina, and they will sort it out.
"You have to abide by its rulings, and if you ignore the decision they send the sicarios (assassins)."
But if P and his rivals' business practices are less mature than those of South American narcos, that's hardly surprising: the Dutch and Belgian cocaine market – at least on this scale – is itself far newer.
Rival gangs are fighting like snakes in a sack for a share of the mind-blowing profits. Meanwhile, everyone else is having to learn to live with the increase of violence on their streets.
At the opening of the trial, prosecutor Koos Plooij spoke of his hope that the gruesome details of the torture chamber might jolt a change of behaviour in those whose drug habits fuel the flames.
"The question is how many people are willing to admit that there is indeed a connection between their cocaine use – whether it is to party, deal with work stress or suppress psychological problems – and the underworld that is happy to answer demand but according to its own rules: corrupting, undermining, tough, sparing nothing and nobody."
It's the right question.
But to hope that the already iconic image of that chair will prompt a collective shudder strong enough to dent society's appetite for cocaine seems fanciful. If anything, the trope has already entered the cultural imagination, which may have prompted it in the first place.
"We have a TV show in The Netherlands called Mocro Mafia and in a recent series they included a shipping container converted for torture," says Meeus.
"It's very, very popular."
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